AUSTRALIAN UPPER MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE NOT THROUGH THE Saudi-Brussels-Davos-Seoul-Goldmans Hyper-criminal Cabal’s ENGINEERED MACHINE INTELLIGENCE Deep-interiority/ No-spaces BACK 2 FRONT TELESCOPE ᵛ

Writer dude with his 38 year-old daughter in inner suburban Melbourne one Saturday morning

Clare and I were having our usual coffee.. she reading the newspaper and me staring out the back door at our forlorn garden wondering how I was going to fill my day.. Every now and then Clare read out some snippet of news, then fell silent again. Out of one of these silences, and without looking up from the newspaper, as if she was reading something, she said, ‘He’s probably working up the courage to ask you to read his novel.’

This is the way we conduct our conversations. It took me a moment to wake up to the fact that she was talking about John.

“ ‘A novel about what?’ I said. ‘John’s not a writer.’

“’Has he told you that? About them.’

“’John doesn’t write,’ I said.

“’How do you know?’

“’I can tell. Writers know when there’s another writer around.’

“’Like cats, you mean?’ She laughed and gave me a look..

“’Yes, just like cats,’ I said. ‘You’re looking very smart, darling. I like that outfit. It suits you.’ ”..

‘I have a dread. It’s a father’s dread. It is an image of Clare after I’m gone, sitting here with the newspaper on Saturday morning reading out snippets to Stubby, or his successor. [Becoming the solitary old lady in her father’s house.] If that happens I will have betrayed Marie; I will have betrayed our covenant of love for our little girl. How could I do that? How could I leave our little girl alone in the world? I wanted to ask her if she’d met someone, but I didn’t dare.. It’s true. She’s still my little girl, my child. My daughter. I owe her everything and she owes me nothing. That’s the way I see it. If you bring a child into the world you owe them everything. I’m haunted by my fear that I have failed her in some way and she will be left alone..

‘ ‘Exceptions are always the exception,’ I said. One thing I knew for certain was that John Patterner was no writer. He had never said anything to me about writing, mine, his own, or anyone else’s. He didn’t talk about the books he weas reading. He kept all that to himself. He had never even let on if he’d read any of my books, and I certainly had not asked him – if they’ve read one of your books and liked it, they can’t wait to tell you. And you don’t want to hear the other thing. Writers talk about their stuff all the time. You can’t shut them up. It’s all they ever talk about. There had never been one word from John on the subject of writing. John was the quiet type, as all true readers are. Keeping their imaginary worlds to themselves. Except when..

‘A writer can’t arbitrarily decide what to write. [We can only do what is offered to us.] What comes our way. I like to call it a conversation with the unconscious. Following the prompts of the imagination. [But these prompts must offer themselves freely. They won’t be forced. That’s the nature of the gift. It’s what we mean when we say people are gifted. They receive the prompts, and they follow them. Not everyone is so prompted, and not everyone who is so prompted follows them.] [But contrary to common belief, writing is not a solitary pursuit; it is always a conversation.]

‘A story will suddenly get a grip, and there it is, a deeper resonance, and you wake in the night thinking about it. I hadn’t reached that stage yet with John’s story, not yet. Perhaps I never would. [But it was out there. It was a possibility.] It had happened to me before..

‘Writing and telling are very different fish. My father was a great storyteller who never wrote a word in his life. [The writer cruises the ocean currents, and often comes to grief out there. The writer who loses his way in what Christina Stead called the ocean of story. It happens all the time. we drown out there. We go under. A familiar voice falls silent and is never heard from again. The Mary Celestes of the writing world.] It’s not something you can calculate. The loss is mysterious and puzzling. The teller, on the other hand, keeps to a familiar stretch of the river and remains safe.’

John

^ a John Blundell Comm-ec Australia Worldwide zinger of say – all library, files and papers stolen by Australian politicians, bikies, spooks & maddies – 1994 (an excellent year for creatives, authors, police sergeants & scholars getting on with their studies & publishing)